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Now, when she looks over toward the window, there is a blue glow seeping in beneath the blind. She does not know if she is angrier with her husband for calling her and unsettling her so much or with herself for allowing something as trivial as a phone call to make her come unhinged. She sighs. She looks over at the numbers on the alarm clock on the nightstand. Soon it will be time for her to get up. She might as well get up and go and make some coffee and get ready to start work.

Since counting didn't
work, the next night she tries imagining the sound of ocean waves. This is what it said to do on a website she found called Overcoming Insomnia when she should have been working on her most recent project, a book instructing engineers on the maintenance and repair of machines that shape the steel exteriors of cars and trucks on the assembly lines of the European subsidiaries of American car manufacturers. But she was too tired to concentrate and had drifted into looking online for answers to the question of what to do if you cannot get to sleep.

Imagining the sound of the sea seemed like a good exercise when she read about it, even though she is extremely suspicious of the whole idea that you can “overcome” insomnia, which sounds as if you are supposed to triumph by an act of will, wrestle your sleeplessness into submission, and which evokes intense concentration or brute force or both, when really what she needs is the exact opposite of this: a kind of soft dissolving of herself during which she turns from a person into a cloud of gold dust that hovers shimmering for a minute before dispersing into the dark with a sound like someone blowing out a candle. Insomnia is more like something you have to sneak under or find a hole in the fence of or find a way to flow around than something you can “overcome.” Also, the man who produced the website, Howard Francus, MD, whose smiling photograph appears on many of its pages, has written a book with the same title as his website,
Overcoming Insomnia
, and the site is really a promotional platform for his book. She can't help suspecting that the information that Dr. Francus put on the website for free is only the peripheral stuff, the least effective and therefore least valuable insights and techniques he has to offer, because wouldn't he want to keep the really good stuff, the real secrets, the magic surefire answers to himself so that you had to buy his book? What would be the point of using the website to promote his book if everyone just read the website and was immediately cured and no one needed to pay $24.99 plus shipping and handling to find out how to go to sleep at night?

Nevertheless, in spite of her profound misgivings, lying in the dark, she tries to imagine the sound of the ocean. It is a long time since she has been to the ocean. As a child she used to live near the coast. Now she lives in a city that, although it is on a lake, is very far from the ocean. There are hundreds of miles of dry land in every direction. Before he left, she and her husband had been planning to go to the beach as soon as both of them could find time for a vacation. In fact, she loves the sea, the smell and sounds of it, the way it throws the light back up into the air so that all the objects near the shore, the houses and the people and the trees and the grass bowed over on the dunes, are tossed around inside a storm of light. How she misses the sea! And she and her husband never did get around to going there together because it always seemed like there was some reason to postpone the trip—either they needed to go and see his family or hers or there was some reason why he couldn't leave work or she had taken on too many projects to go away from home for an extended time—and so they delayed and delayed and sometimes when they were in bed at night and felt close to each other either because they had made love or just because some of the cold distance between them seemed to give way a little, they would talk again about going to the ocean, they would promise to make the time, they would get down the calendar and mark off a week and determine that the next day they would each do what was necessary to ensure that they could go away. But then something would come up and it wouldn't happen and after a while they stopped talking about it and then they stopped talking about anything at all.

At some point she realizes that she has said to herself that “they” felt close to each other and “they would determine” to finally take the time to spend together, but in fact she doesn't know whether it was only she who felt these things, the closeness and the renewed goodwill toward their marriage; she supposes that her husband shared these same emotions. But it is just as likely, given what happened later, that he was feeling and thinking something entirely different, although what it was she cannot know. He is a sealed box to her now, his mind and heart entirely opaque, and what is worse she understands that he always was this way; it only seemed that she could see inside him, all the way to the bottom of him as it is possible to see through shallow water at the edge of the sea.

Is she still concentrating on hearing the sound of the ocean, as Dr. Francus suggested? When she tries to call it back, all she can get her mind to produce is the grating sound of different kinds of engines, the hyperactive shrieking of a leaf blower or the nasal buzz of a lawn mower or the slicing, snorting sound of a motorcycle. Now the motorcycles multiply, there are many motorcycles all driving slowly through her head together. They rev their engines. There must be ten or twelve of them at least. She turns on the bedside light and fumbles on the floor for her glasses. The light is like a bouquet of knives. Is that too overwrought? How else to describe how piercing it is? It is made of levitating shards of glass. Tomorrow, if she still can't get to sleep, she will make an appointment to see her doctor and get some sleeping pills. She doesn't want to do this quite yet. Because what if the phone rings again, late at night, and she is too sound asleep and she misses it? Maybe she will give it just one more night before she gets the medication. Or maybe two.

The following night,
she cannot get the idea out of her mind that someone is going to come into the apartment. She cannot picture the person's features, only his unusual height and bulk, which is masculine in a general way without taking on the concrete features of an individual man. He is not white or black, but he does appear to be wearing her father's favorite old cardigan, which was gray with round leather buttons and leather patches on the elbows. This is his only distinguishing feature. She doesn't know how he is going to get into her apartment. She has already checked that both doors and all the windows are locked. And yet, every time there is a noise close by, either from out in the street or from somewhere inside the building, she starts, convinced absolutely that it is the footsteps of this man. She can hear him coming down the corridor, approaching the door of her apartment. Now. somehow, he is inside her apartment. He is right outside her bedroom. He waits in the hall outside her door, until she has almost forgotten he is there and then he makes a noise.

She tells herself that there is no man, but the more she tries to convince herself of this, the more he begins to take on distinguishing features. His eyes are green and one is slightly higher than the other. His nose is flat and broad at the bottom, so he looks like a figure in a painting by Picasso or like the Giant of Cern Abbes. He does not appear to have a mouth at all, as though whoever made him forgot to give him one, but rather than being horrifying as you might imagine a person with no mouth to be, this gives him a quizzical kind of expression like he is listening with genuine curiosity, his head tilted slightly to one side.

What would she do, she wonders, if there really was a man outside her bedroom door? The door has a lock on it, but she does not usually lock it at night because there is no one else in the apartment and because she worries about what would happen if there was a fire in the middle of the night, whether if she locked her door it might not make it more difficult for her to escape or for the firemen to come in and rescue her. She has to balance the concern that someone might get into her bedroom with the concern that she might not be able to get out in an emergency. She imagines the fire chief shaking his head sadly as the local news reporters hold microphones out to him in front of the burned-out husk of her apartment building, and talking about how they managed to get everyone out except for one woman up on the seventh floor who had locked her bedroom door and they couldn't reach her in time. Asphyxiation, the fire chief says. People don't think about these things. Why would she lock her door like that? Was she worried about someone coming in? That is just ridiculous.

But is it so ridiculous? These things do happen, men breaking into women's homes and stealing things or assaulting them or worse. If she heard someone outside her door, what would she do? She could call 911 and hope they arrived fast enough to rescue her. She could try running out of her room suddenly, hoping to surprise the man so much that she would have a chance to get away, run out of her apartment, sound the alarm. She could try talking to the man, finding out what he wants, trying to appeal to his human side not to hurt her.

Outside her door, there is a sudden, loud, creaking sound, like the noise made by a stomping foot. He is right outside. She sits up in the bed and turns on the light; the part of her that believes there really is someone in the apartment screams at her not to do this, that she has just given away her presence and now, surely, he will come in and—what? Kill her most likely. She tries to reason with herself. There is no one there. She needs to go out of her room and make certain of this. Maybe then she will be able to go back to bed and get some sleep.

She goes to the door. She takes a deep breath. She opens it, quickly, and sees that her hall is empty. But of course he could have withdrawn into another room, be hidden right now somewhere out of sight but watching her. She walks around her home, turning on the lights in each room, opening the closet doors. Soon the whole apartment is bright from end to end. She sits down at the kitchen table and remembers that when she would get scared, which didn't happen very often, her husband would do what she herself has just now done. Walk through the house, turn on the lights, prove that there is no one hiding, no ghosts, no people, no one there but the two of them. Sometimes he would do it impatiently: stop being so silly. But sometimes he would do it gently, quietly, showing her the rooms with nothing in them to be frightened of. When he did this, she would calm down immediately. She would sleep happily and without interruption for the rest of the night. She would be aware of his body stretched beside hers in their bed, appreciative of its presence, because who else would have cared for her in this small, absurd way, even some of the time, except for him?

Now she sits down at the table in her dining room, with all the lights blazing around her, feeling extra bright as they do late at night. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. No one comes either to comfort her or to harm her. She is all alone.

She tries, in
this order: valerian root tea, which makes her lose feeling in her tongue so then she is lying in bed awake with a numb tongue in her mouth that feels like something someone else left there promising to come back and get it at the end of the day but then forgetting to do so; melatonin, which seems to make her more wide awake through the night so that even the fitful sleep she has been managing to get evaporates; a strange kind of herbal tea that she buys from a hippy herbalist store near her house that smells like armpit and looks a bit like armpit hair but that cannot, she tells herself, possibly be in any way really related to armpits. None of these things works. She keeps her phone in the same spot on the counter in her kitchen where it was when she got the first phone call from France, but it does not ring.

Then, one night, about a week later, she is lying in bed thinking about global warming. This is a topic that she has been returning to at night quite often, thinking about how the difficulty with trying to solve global warming is that anything you do, any effort human beings make, whether it is holding a conference or publishing a book or making a movie to try to spread the word and convince people that global warming is real, only adds to the problem. Almost everyone, in America at least, who goes to see the movie will have to drive a car to get there, or if they watch it at home, they'll watch it on a television that was made in China in a factory that uses fossil fuels and then sent to the United States on a freighter that also burns fossil fuels, and while they are watching the film they will be using electricity that also probably comes from fossil fuels. Similarly, if they hold a conference, all the people who travel there will have to fly and stay in hotels and use taxis. Basically, the only thing you can do that will have a positive effect on climate change, unless you are a scientist who is working to invent some brilliant alternative to gasoline and coal, is nothing. If you do nothing, travel nowhere, eat nothing, use no light and don't drive, you will not be contributing to the problem. Otherwise, you will be. Is anything I do, she thought, actually worth the damage that I cause just by being alive in this time and place? Really, the only time when we aren't damaging things is when we are asleep, in the dark in our beds, and now she doesn't appear to be able to do even that. Maybe it would be better not to exist, to disappear.

What if no one was able to sleep anymore? What if we created a world of such uncertainty and such loneliness that one by one everyone in America found that they were unable to fall asleep? Each one of us is awake in our separate apartments, which we don't share with anyone else because we didn't want to stay with our parents and we couldn't get along with our spouse and fewer of us than ever have children and even then, our children don't stay with us for very long. Each of us is wandering around our lit-up rooms, our minds scurrying down corridors like mice in a maze, unable to find our way to the soft place where we feel blessed and possessed by the world, able to stop striving and allow ourselves to float along for a while on the currents of the world, which is so much bigger and more mysterious than we can imagine. Maybe we are lonely for a world that we do not and cannot understand, that swirls around us in a beautiful storm and for which we cannot be held responsible.